Making History Online

Now available as a video, transcript and PowerPoint slides is the Royal Historical Society/Gresham College Annual Colin Matthew Memorial Lecture.

Presented last Wednesday by Professors Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, this lecture:

"assesses how recent innovations in making historical resources available online, and in the crowdsourcing and co-creation of research materials, have effectively reconfigured the relationship between the academy and the public. We can all be historians now.
Despite limitations, an online dialogue between academic history and the public is not only inevitable, but also desirable."

Speaking to historians they conclude:

"Our belief is that we are in a fantastic age of new and popular historical engagement, and while it is not being led by academic historians (nor should it be); we need to be actively involved - and make sure that we add our tuppence to the pot. Academics should do our bit to ensure that academic history is remade more open, more democratically accessible, and ever more able to do the business of allowing society to question itself, to question its values in light of its past, its politics and its inherited principles. Despite the ‘disruptions’ as long as we keep in mind these underlying purposes of history writing we can’t go far wrong."